The Number of Licks to Get to the Center of a Tootsie Pop
by The Carnivorous Muffin
Summary: On the ship ride from Tatooine to Coruscant, Lee and Obito continue their card game in Obi-Wan's absence, and wax nostalgia about genin days long since past as well as Kakashi being... Kakashi. side fic to "Finishing the Hat"


**Author's Note: A note, that this is a side fic to "Finishing the Hat" and if you haven't read a chunk of that you'll be a bit confused as to what's even going on and why characters are talking about all these things.**

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Obito didn't think often about the early genin days. In his mind it'd seemed almost natural that there should be some great divide, a before and after, where before was the world before the Kannabi bridge and after everything else. In that first world he was in the academy, then Minato-sensei's genin student along with Rin and Kakashi.

That Obito had been relatively naïve, desperate, boisterous, thick-headed, stubborn and the black sheep of the family who had not quite come to grips with his isolation.

In other words, that Obito was a child, a young boy who didn't quite understand what the word hokage, what the weight of the hat and the village, could possibly mean other than respect and a recognition of his own perseverance and talents.

After the Kannabi bridge, after Madara, after becoming Lee-shishou's apprentice, after the death of his grandmother, after being exiled from the clan and moving into the Hatake compound, after he'd sacrificed his eye to Kakashi…

Well, point being, in every way that counted, Obito hadn't really started being Obito, the Uchiha Obito he was now, until after the Kannabi bridge mission. As a result, other than the occasional wistful nostalgia or embarrassed flashback, his academy or genin years were not something he regularly thought about.

However, sometimes they would be brought up for him.

They were inside the silver ship, sailing through the stars towards Coruscant along with Skywalker Anakin and Shmi, a foreign queen and her civilian guards, a demented orange frog man, as well as two strange quasi-shinobi, had they been in a bar Obito would have said they were the set-up for a fabulously awful joke. Regardless, towards the end of Lee and his poker game (which Kenobi Obi-Wan like a coward had abandoned after losing too many hands and getting huffy about cheating), Lee passed her latest losings over to Obito, a pair of photographs, mirroring each other rather than her usual white slip IOU.

He picked up the first, a faded picture, older than a decade now, the picture of Lee-shishou and Minato-sensei's team seven. There was Lee, a little girl then, twelve-years-old, her eyes green and bright, grinning her idiot's grin at the camera. A child version of Minato-sensei stood next to her, a softer more amused grin on his face, standing close enough that he and Lee were almost touching but not quite. Then, beside them, the third teammate who Obito hadn't had much of a chance to meet (before his extreme makeover when he looked more or less average) and Jiraiya-sama standing behind them with a cheerful grin of his own, likely hiding his own bewilderment at his students (as, if Obito remembered right, Lee had resurrected the shodaime and nidaime very early into her genin career).

The second was a newer, far more familiar picture, featuring Obito's genin team, Minato-sensei twenty-years-old and taking Jiraiya-sama's place with that same heartfelt and tender smile that he'd had in his own genin picture. There was Kakashi, standing next to Obito, arm slung around Obito's thin ten-year-old shoulders, wearing his sister's grin on his face as if he had as much right to it as anyone else. Rin, smiling pleasantly as she stood next to Kakashi, the only truly normal one of the group. Finally, Obito himself, looking away from the camera to mulishly glare at Hatake Kakashi as if this alone would get the clan heir to pay him the proper respect that Obito, as future hokage, undoubtedly deserved.

On seeing the picture, both pictures side by side, Obito couldn't help but bark out a laugh, almost missing Lee's self-satisfied smile across from him at his reaction.

"Shishou, you do realize I have a copy of this one, don't you?" Obito said, waving his team seven's photograph in front of her, "I'm hardly going to accept this as payment."

"The photograph, my young apprentice, is hardly the prize," Lee quipped mysteriously back, putting on her old wise master charade that was best suited to an elderly man three times her age.

"Nostalgia then?" Obito asked, and perhaps she was right, because he could feel his own smile growing softer as he delved into softer, fonder, memories of days he hardly considered anymore.

"Team seven across the ages," Obito summarized, placing the pictures next to one another between himself and Lee, tilting his head as he looked at them, "Funny, given all that, you'd think we'd have more similarities between us."

At Lee's somewhat questioning look Obito went on to explain.

"I can hardly speak for the sannin," Obito started, his eyes lingering on Lee's photograph, "But between your team and mine, well, our dead last, rookie of the year, and best kunoichi didn't really line up. Kakashi was supposed to be like Minato or else Orochimaru, but he was really you lite, Rin was really more like your Dead Last, personality wise at least, and me… I don't even know who the hell I'm supposed to be."

He looked across at her, smiled, "Who knew there could be such a large variety of rookies, kunoichis, and dead lasts?"

"It's been surprisingly successful so far," Lee said with a nonchalant shrug, but she had a point, even though, thus far, only three of this particularly configuration had become ridiculously overpowered and famous, though for Obito's team that was debatable. Kakashi was certainly on his way to S-ranked jonin and Obito was technically an A-ranked chunin and nothing to be sneezed but Rin did not quite hold up to Tsunade-sama nor did she hold up even to Lee and Minato's Dead Last. Either way, perhaps this had been the extraordinary jonin senseis assigned to each of these teams, perhaps they'd gotten lucky, but the point was that if this combination had produced teams of S-ranked ninjas, multiple times, then they were going to keep the team-seven combination until it killed them.

With that, he leaned back, inspecting the set of photographs again in amusement, trying to remember what those days had been like, those first steps forward to becoming a real ninja and not just the dead last academy student.

"You know," Obito mused as his eyes fell once again on the ten-year-old Kakashi, "I had absolutely no idea what to make of Bakashi when we first met."

"I didn't really meet him until I was ten, the morning of Minato-sensei's bell test. He was in and out of the academy so fast I don't think I even remember seeing him there," Obito explained, which was true enough, Kakashi had maybe been in their class for a week before they'd started moving him through years and finally graduating him before the year was even out.

Obito remembered being vaguely annoyed that this brat had entered and exited the academy before anyone had had a chance to blink. That sort of blatant, undeniable, talent had been like a slap in Obito's face, and had been brought up constantly whenever he reminded everyone that one day he was going to be hokage so they better shut their arrogant mouths. That, and even then, along with every other kunoichi their age in the village, Rin had thought Hatake Kakashi was somehow both so adorable and so cool at the same time.

Still, Hatake Kakashi just wasn't around long enough to have feelings about one way or another, there were other rivals to focus on, other things to fill his time, and even if he heard vague rumors about how the Hatake clan heir had made chunin at the ungodly age of six and was being passed from team to team like a sack of unwanted potatoes, Obito hadn't spent too much time thinking about it.

"Yes, Kakashi really stopped hanging around the academy after he'd graduated," Lee noted, her eyes also on the photograph, "He hadn't made any friends inside or outside the academy, so I don't think he had any real reason to linger. He always had a hard time dealing with people his own age, I think he was waiting a long time for you to catch up in any and every sense."

"He said as much," Obito acknowledged, "Later, of course, he does possess some tact underneath that idiot-savant act he likes to constantly pull. I think he knew I wouldn't have taken that sort of a comment well at ten or even eleven."

Although the idea of Kakashi possessing any kind of tact or any social intelligence whatsoever was goddamn hilarious. The truth of it was, or at least Obito thought after years of being his teammate and roommate, that Bakashi wasn't totally oblibous but rather that he liked putting people on edge and making them uncomfortable. Some people knitted sweaters in their free time, Obito personally read through Lee's old English books and watched through her copious collection of DVDs, Kakashi read porn in public and held the world's best poker face while everyone squirmed around him. Everyone had their hobbies.

"He always liked you though," Lee noted, "Not Rin as much at first, but you, the morning of the bell test he came home and said he'd never seen anyone that ballsy before in his life."

Now that was not a statement that Obito had heard before, he could feel his eyebrows lowering and his face going blank as he asked, "… Are you serious?"

But Lee seemed perfectly serious as she nodded and casually expanded, "You were late, to your own genin test, and the first thing you did after spouting some lame excuse about a cat in a tree and your grandmother was prophesize your own future as hokage even when Minato kicked you into the river at least twelve times after you kept charging at him like a complete jackass, stubbornly oblivious to the fact that your very existence was undoubtedly an embarrassment to your whole clan. Kakashi said he'd never seen anything like it."

And Obito felt like this bout of nostalgia they were sharing in was going entirely off the rails, more, he was pretty sure that he hadn't wanted to know these details, or that even at ten Kakashi had been picking up the weird Uchiha clan politics when even at the time Obito hadn't really understood them.

"I'm not sure ballsy is the word I would have used for that," Obito said, certainly Rin hadn't been impressed waiting forty-five minutes for Obito to sprint his way to the training grounds and apologize for being late.

Then again, Rin had been witnessing Obito's most embarrassing moments for years, and if Obito hadn't been already been dying of internal shame warring with internal pride for years he probably would have died on the spot when he'd arrived panting and she'd cast him this annoyed glare.

"And I'm not taking that as a compliment even with six years of retrospect," Obito further insisted, much to Lee's apparent amusement as her lips quirked up into that quintessentially Lee smile of hers.

"Oh, he meant every word of it," Lee insisted in turn, before gesturing to the photograph and explaining, "You have to understand what Kakashi's genin team situation had been like. I lost track of how many genin teams they shoved him into. The first was an unmitigated disaster, especially after Kakashi earned chunin in the first year, and the rest were even worse. No one could respect him and certainly not acknowledge him as a higher ranked ninja. He'd seen every type of unprepared brat you can imagine, and after five years of it, it really started to get to him. Yet, even after all of that, even after thinking he'd had just about everyone figured out, there comes Uchiha Obito proving his every preconception wrong and doing everything to Minato-sensei that he'd wanted to do for years."

Oh god, Obito didn't really want to know that he'd apparently been Kakashi's rebellious idol. Especially, when, at the time, Obito had been anything but rebellious, just chronically late to everything and severely untalented.

However, looking back, he couldn't believe that Lee-shishou was wrong about this one.

Obito felt himself grimace remembering how shortly after he'd started consistently showing up late, Kakashi had made it a point to show up later, much later, with excuses ten times as ridiculous as anything Obito himself could possibly come up with.

Obito, for weeks, had thought Bakashi was mocking him in front of Rin, it'd taken repeated measures (and watching Minato-sensei passive-aggressively kick the shit out of Kakashi multiple times in spars) for Obito to get that maybe Kakashi was secretly from another planet after all and had nothing personal against Obito or for Rin.

In fact, the more Obito thought about it, the more he realized, "Now that you mention it, Kakashi really didn't care about Rin in the beginning."

It was such an odd thought, mostly from Obito's perspective where he couldn't imagine a world where anyone was indifferent to Rin, but Kakashi… had been. It was actually one of the things that had allowed them to become friends within the first few months of being on a team together, well, that and Kakashi showing up at Obito's house all the damn time for grandmother's home cooked meals and gossip. The point was, that even as dense and stubborn as Obito had been at the time, it'd become pretty clear pretty quickly that Hatake Kakashi wasn't a threat when it came to Rin.

Rin might have batted her eyes at him, or blushed when he stared her in the eyes, but he had absolutely no interest whatsoever in her or any other girl that happened across their paths. Rin had eventually seemed to come to grips with this, set aside whatever her feelings on Kakashi were, and moved on and just as easily Obito had moved on from Kakashi too.

Well, Kakashi the potential love rival, Bakashi the idiot best friend who showed up on his doorstep at six am to eat fried rice would last for years.

Actually, that brought up a whole other barrel of thoughts, that Kakashi had always seemed very interested in Obito and not at all interested in Rin. Obito could feel himself flush, his tongue tie itself, and doubts of whether this was something he really wanted to know or not blaring through his head while Lee, with raised eyebrows, watched.

Finally, Obito hesitantly asked, "Hey, shishou, I don't know if you'd happen to know… Did, or does… Does Kakashi… like me?"

Lee blinked, nonplussed, even as Obito cringed and tried to explain all of the suspicions he'd had over the years that had built up on one another except he might be paranoid and Kakashi loved nothing more than a breaching experiment and would be thrilled with Obito serving as a seven year victim and counting, "It's just, I know he reads Jiraiya-sama's porn, I know, but he's… Never seemed that into Rin, or anyone, except he has always paid a lot of attention to me. I think he even serenaded me outside of my window one time, dammit. And I just want to know, from a reliable source, does Bakashi actually want in my pants or is he just fucking with me?"

Lee simply stared, saying nothing.

Obito paused, reconsidered his last statement, and amended, "Not literally fucking, that's the same as option number one, you know, mentally making me extremely uncomfortable for shits and giggles. Yes, that, not the first thing I said."

Lee simply continued to blankly stare at Obito, saying absolutely nothing, finally, she stood, gathering up her copious slips of IOUs while a dismayed Obito watched, "Are you seriously not going to give me an answer, shishou?"

Once the cards had vanished and the IOUs were stored inside some alternate dimension where Lee tended to store all her extraneous shit, or wherever things went when Lee stopped paying attention to them, Lee simply said to him, "Like the number of licks it will take to get to the center of a _tootsie-pop_ , there are some things, Obito, that the world will simply never know."

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 **Author's Note: Written for the 400th review of "Finishing the Hat" by Spoit0 who asked for a slice of life style story about Obito, Kakashi, and Rin's genin shenanigans with an extra dosing of Kakashi. Well, we didn't get quite the shenanigans but there was certainly waxing nostalgia over the weirdness of Bakashi and his feelings, whatever they happen to be.**

 **Thanks for reading, reviews are much appreciated.**

 **Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter, Naruto, or Star Wars**


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